It was the greatest art theft in history: 650,000 works looted from Europe by the Nazis, many of which were never recovered. But last November the world learned that German authorities had found a trove of 1,280 paintings, drawings, and prints worth more than a billion dollars in the Munich apartment of a haunted white-haired recluse. Amid an international uproar, Alex Shoumatoff follows a century-old trail to reveal the crimes—and obsessions—involved.

Along one stretch of New York asphalt—44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues—the author excavates a vanishing civilization, peeling back decades of his own past as well. Thirty years on, the barber in the old New Yorker building is still there. The blueblood haunts are trapped in amber. The ghosts of Frank Crowninshield, William Shawn, Dorothy Parker, and Harry Houdini linger. From the Algonquin to the Harvard Club, to the ever morphing Royalton, Alex Shoumatoff savors the madeleines of the life he left behind.